Acquired dysgraphia
A specific difficulty with writing words, caused by brain damage.
Acquired dislexia
Impairment of the ability to read caused by brain damage.
Active perception
Perception as a function of interaction with the world.
Affordances
Represent the interaction of the individual with the environment. Objects afford the use to which the individual can put them.
Agnosia
The failure to recognize or stimuli despite adequate sensory function. Usually classified by sensory modality, so visual agnosia is the failure to recognize objects that are seen.
Agrammatism
A pattern of aphasic symptoms characterized by a lack of grammatical structure in speech, with a tendency for grammatical function words and inflections to be omitted.
Algorithm
A well- defined procedure or recipe for processing information.
Alzheimer's disease
A degenerative brain disorder usually (but not always) afflicting the elderly, which first appearse as an impairment of memory but later develops into a more general dementia.
Amnesia
A pathological impairment of memory function.
Anomia
An impaired ability to name objects.
Anterograde amnesia (AA)
Impaired memory for events which have occured since the onset of the disorder (contrasts with retrograde amnesia)
Aphasia
Loss or impairment of one or more aspects of language caused by brain damage.
Articulatory suppression
A task used to occupy the articulatory control process of the working memory, normally involving the repetition of a sound ( such as "the") which requires articulation but little processing.
Attention
Focusing cognitive resources on a single input or distributing them across multiple tasks.
Attention conspicuity
The interaction of aspects of a stimulus (such as color, luminance,form) with aspects of an individual (such as attention, knowledge,pre-conceptions) that determine how likely a stimulus is to be consciously perceived( See also sensory conspicuity)
Attentional engagement theory (AET)
Modification of feature integration theorry (FIT) proposewd by Duncan and Humphries in which relationship between distracters in vidual search is also important.
Attenuation
Amount of processing a stimulus receivesbeing variable depending upon the task and the personal significance of the stimulus.
Automatic processing
Processing that is not under conscious control as which is rapid, inevitable and involuntary (contrast with controlled processing).
Availability heuristic
Making judgements on the basis of how available relevant examples are in our memory store.
Backpropagation
"Backpropagation of error". A supervised learning algorithm for training multilayer feed-forward networks.
Base-rate fallacy
Ignoring information about the base rate in light of other information.
Basin of attraction
In a recurrent net with stable states, the set of states which eventually lead to a particular stable state.
Bahaviourism
An approach to psychology which constrains psychologists to the investigation of externally observable behaviour, and which rejects any consideration of inner mental processes.
Binaural cues
Cues to, for example, sound direction that rely on comparing the input from both ears.
Blindsight
The ability of some functionally blind patents to detect visual stimuli at an unconscious level, despite having no conscious awareness of seeing them. Usually observed in patients with occipital lobe lesions.
Bottom-up (or stimulus-driven) processing
Processing which is directed by information containedwithin the stimulus (contrast with top-down processing)
Broca's area
A region of the brain normally located in the left frontal region, which controls motor speech production.
Capacity
A fixed limit on the information processing ability of the human cognitive system.
Cell assembly
A group of cells which have become linked to one another to form a single functional network. Proposed by Hebbas a possible biological mechanism underlying the representation and storage of a memory trace.
Central executive
A hypotheticam mechanism which is believed to be in overall control of the working memory. It is assumed to control a variety of tasks, such as decision -making, problem-solving and selective attention.
Channels
In dichotic listening refers to the subjects' ears.
Classical AI
Artificial intelligence which relies on algorithmic symbol manipulation.
Cocktail-party phenomenon
Situation of attending to a single conversation against a background of many other conversations. Moddeled by dichotic listening.
Cognitive neuropsychology
The study of the brain activities underlying cognitive processes, often by investigating cognitive impairment in brain damaged patients.
Cognitive neuroscience
The investigation of human cognition by relating it to brain structure and function, normally based on brain imaging techniques.
Cognitive psychology
The study of the way in which the brain processes information. It includes the mental processes involved in perception, learning and memory storage, thinking and language.
Cognitivism
A paradigm for cognitive science that holds that cognition may be adequately explained using symbol-based models.
Cohesive devices
Ways of indicating within a text that an item such as a word or sentence is linked to what has gone before.
Competence
The linguistic knowledge hypothesised to underlie the ability to use language.
Computational cognitive neuroscience
Using a neural network-style model which is structured by what we know about the circuits in the brain responsable for that particular cognitive task.
Computational neuroscience
Building neural networks models which incorporate anatomical and physiological data about artificial neurons.
Computer modelling
The simulation of human cognitive processes by computer. Often used as a method of testing the feasibility of an information processing mechanism.
Conducion aphasia
An impairment of language in which the most obvious symptoms is an ibability to repeat what was just heard.
Confabulation
The reporting of memories which are incorrect and apparently fabricated, but which patients believe to be true.
Conjoint search
Visual search for a target defined by a combination of characteristics.
Connectionist system
A neural network which attempts to model some aspects of perception or cognition.
Consistent mapping
In Shifrin and Schneider's visual search task, a situation in which the memory set of the-be-detected-items is consistent across trials.
Constancy
The ability to perceive constant objects in the world despite continual changes in viewing conditions.
Constructivist approach
Building up our perception of the world from incomplete sensory input (See also perceptual hypotheses)
Content word
A word such as a noun, verb or adjective that carries meaning beyond its grammatical role in the sentence.
